Democracy takes work. That's the thing we're really finding out, that, you know, in many ways, you know, the past two decades we've taken for granted all of the extraordinary achievements of the post-war generation. You know, building this global alliance structure that has kept the peace across the North Atlantic since World War II. Building all of these institutions, building all this remarkable technology. And people have privatized. You know, you can now, you don't have to go outdoors much, the whole world comes to you.

If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don't usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves.

I do think Hillary Clinton, I mean the Clintons, I`ve got a lot of critiques of the Clinton foundation. I do think they bend the law. But Hillary Clinton accepts the concept of legality, she accepts that courts are supreme, laws must be complied with and the power of the state is not to be used for persona revenge or personal enrichment. And that`s something - not something I trust Donald Trump to do.

One of the things that really has gone wrong in modern politics, one of the things that made Trump possible was that many people have a view of politics as something dramatic and exciting and thrilling and emotional.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

Trump is not just unlike a Republican, he's unlike a presidential candidate. The whole elaborate presidential process is designed to screen out people like Donald Trump. And that process broke down in ways quite unlike anything in the recent experience of the United States.

Speech writers are more vulnerable to vanity than any other group of people in Washington.